On The Front Lines Of Ebola: My Interview With An Entrepreneur In Liberia

Willy Foote
, ContributorI write about agri-business and the impact of social entrepreneurship.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

I spend most days focused on the core mission of my organization, Root Capital: providing finance for small and growing agricultural businesses in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. But all too often, I’m confronted with harrowing reminders of the larger challenges facing our clients and the vulnerable communities they represent.

Like many of you, I have been following reports of the Ebola outbreak that is currently affecting West Africa. Root Capital has local team members in Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Senegal, and the worst Ebola outbreak in history has been on my mind near constantly these past few weeks, and it is heartbreaking.

As I read about the epidemic and kept tabs on our colleagues, I thought about my good friend Chid Liberty, a Liberian social entrepreneur who fled with his family to the United States when he was a boy due to civil war.

In 2009, Chid returned to Liberia after 28 years in exile to establish the Liberian Women’s Sewing Project, Africa’s first Fair Trade-certified apparel factory, to provide economic opportunities for internally displaced women.

The following year, Root Capital made our inaugural loan in Liberia and became the Liberian Women’s Sewing Project’s first outside source of financing. Today, these women sell clothing to leading American brands through Liberty & Justice, the social enterprise that Chid is rapidly growing in Liberia and throughout the region.

Over the weekend, Chid was kind enough to share with me his first-hand perspective on the Ebola outbreak in Liberia.

Willy Foote: We have seen a lot of front-page reporting on the Ebola crisis in West Africa. Can you give us a sense of the current situation in Liberia? What part of the story is not being told?

Chid Liberty: Ebola has been in local headlines since early 2014. It is a pretty hard disease to contract because it's spread through direct contact with sick people's bodily fluids and infected corpses. It's not like the flu or other airborne viruses. The risk of contracting Ebola is relatively low. In Liberia, more people have died from malaria and typhoid this year than from Ebola, but that's not newsworthy, I suppose.

The global panic didn't start until Dr. Kent Brantly and another American health worker got sick. I think the idea of two white Americans catching Ebola in Africa generally scared the daylights out of Liberians and the world, alike. Health workers dealing with Ebola patients are at high risk of catching the virus. In fact, Liberia's top local physician, Dr. Samuel Brisbane, had already fallen prey to the virus the same week that Dr. Brantly was infected. But it seems that because the new victims no longer looked like me, suddenly, a global panic was justified.

Don't get me wrong, the panic was completely warranted. This has turned into a humanitarian crisis beyond our wildest nightmares. It's the timing of the panic that makes me uneasy. The World Health Organization has been reporting about unprecedented African deaths since March. It's sad that after bravely saving so many lives and caring for so many sick people, Dr. Brantly's greatest contribution to Liberia might be that he caught the virus himself. All of a sudden, even Donald Trump was tweeting about Ebola in West Africa.

More recently, all the media rage was about Liberians breaking their loved ones out of an Ebola holding facility in West Point, Monrovia's most notorious slum. People seem shocked by this story. I am not.

Picture finding your family, by some strange turn of events, in a slum in Liberia. Your daughter is sick. It might just be a stomach bug but it might also be life threatening. You are ushered to the only place that will take her: an Ebola holding center in an abandoned West Point school. All hospitals throughout the country are closed and the main Ebola treatment center in town doesn't have enough beds for its patients.

You are told to leave your daughter with a stranger who is also caring for 16 other patients, some of whom appear to have Ebola. There's no diagnostic testing, running water, or electricity. Other families grumble outside in doubt about whether their loved ones are receiving adequate care. Your daughter is simply told to lie on a bare mattress on the ground until she recovers or is moved to a proper treatment center 30 minutes away.

Would you leave your daughter there?

Foote: You returned to Liberia in 2009 to establish Liberty & Justice, Africa's first Fair Trade apparel manufacture. How has the Ebola outbreak affected your business and what does it mean for the future of Liberty & Justice?

Liberty: In 2011, after partnering with Root Capital to launch Liberty & Justice, we signed a few big deals with two American buyers. It was a pretty exciting time for the company. To fulfill those orders, we needed to raise a lot more capital, build a new factory, import all new equipment, and hire 200 more workers. We finally finished the renovations on the factory in the beginning of this year.